A method and a device for processing data, having basic information and elements with information supplementing the basic information, are described below.
In communication systems messages are transmitted between transmitters and receivers. A specific example of communication systems are radio communication systems. In radio communications systems messages such as signaling messages or user data messages with speech information, picture information, video information, SMS (Short Message Service), MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) or other data for example are transmitted with the aid of electromagnetic waves over a radio interface between transmitting and receiving station. The stations can in this case, depending on the concrete embodiment of the radio communication system, be various types of subscriber-side radio stations, repeaters, or network-side radio stations such as base stations or radio access points. In a mobile radio communications system at least one part of the subscriber-side radio stations are mobile radio stations. The electromagnetic waves are emitted with carrier frequencies which lie in the frequency band provided for the relevant system.
Mobile radio communications systems are often embodied as cellular systems, in accordance with the GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication) or UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications system) standard for example, with a network infrastructure including, for example, base stations, devices for checking and control of the base stations and further network-side devices. As well as these cellular, hierarchical radio networks organized on a wide-area (supralocal) basis, there are also Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) with a radio coverage area that as a rule is far more limited.
For the transmission of scalable information the basic information is transmitted, and in addition information which supplements the basic information. The characteristic of scalable data is thus that it can be present at the receiver in reduced quality, in that the receiver only decodes the basic information or the basic information and a part of the supplementary information, and not the basic information and all supplementary information. Data which is sent simultaneously to a number of subscribers can be present as scalable information at the sender in the best possible quality, i.e. as basic information and supplementary information. Before the data is transmitted or when it is being distributed in the network to the different receivers, an adaptation/scaling of the data is undertaken such that different parts of the supplementary information are forwarded to the different receivers, so that only the supplementary information needed by the respective receiver is transmitted. This proves advantageous especially with radio communication systems because of the scarce transmission resources.